Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Mystery of the Top 6

If you go to our MerchantCircle home page, you can find a list of our Top 6 merchants under 'most popular'. As you may already know, we've essentially built a web page for every business in the U.S. Over 120,000 of you have already claimed your page, but keep in mind, we have over 15 million businesses on MerchantCircle. Still, even at 120,000 we are the fastest growing and largest network of SMBs on the web.

Back to the Top 6 - the interesting thing about that list is that two of the merchants have not claimed their business listing. Both Kimpa Sport Fishing (with nearly 12,000 visitors to their page) and Fina Oil & Chemical (more than 7,000 in the last 30 days) are the lone hold-outs. Far more interesting is the MerchantCircle algorithm that spells out higher search engine rankings for merchants who create content (coupons, blogs, ads) and link to other pages on the web. Obviously Kimpa and Fina have not done that since they haven't even claimed their page.

So why are people going to their MerchantCircle pages? Normally a business may get a huge spike like that if a major crime or controversial news story took place at the business. Or if a huge celebrity like me shows up one day......

For now, the mystery has partially been solved - they're coming up high in search engine results. In the meantime, keep creating content and linking to other web pages, because we all can't be as fortunate as Kimpa and Fina. Take a look at Small Wonders Imaging, LLC and Wedding Supplies Unlimited - they are doing a great job interacting with their customers and coming up high in search engines. As a busines owner, that's what being on the web should be about - if you're not found on that first page of results you're only hurting yourself.